I wonder how this squares with Maslow's theories of the hierarchy of needs, self-actualization being at the top. Are we just doomed to keep trying to be "fulfilled" and "happy"? To me, it seems like the rest of the world is simply too busy to worry about all this (as noted in the article in reference to Thailand), for better or worse.

I'll never forget a comparative literature professor my senior year of college summing up our discussion of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams by saying something like, "The unconscious tricks us into thinking we know what we want. But our desire never finds a real object to satisfy us. In the end what we REALLY want is to want."